They say the youngest princess of Kairaku tore her way savagely from her mother’s womb. The night of her arrival, three gods bent low over the palace, their shadows cast across Seidan’s walls. Her first cry split the air, pale as winter, bleached as bone, and her mother’s answering scream was not of labor, but of terror. The queen’s blood did not cease, and by dawn she was gone, leaving the child behind—skin white as moonstone, eyes the color of diluted ash.

The courtiers whispered that the gods had claimed their due. Some named her cursed, others sacred. Yet all agreed, she was unlike her eight elder siblings, a fragment of something otherworldly set among them, as though the kingdom itself had given birth through her mother’s body.

The king, who buried his queen that dawn, never forgave the child who robbed him. Yet neither could he turn her away. She was blood of his blood, bone of his bone, and though his hand often trembled when it lingered near her, he still called her daughter. Yet, he kept her apart. While her eight siblings were raised together beneath Seidan’s high roofs, the youngest was hidden behind veils and screens, visited only at a distance, as though her touch might stain them.

Only once each month was she summoned to the great table, to sit among her family. There she appeared, thinner than straw, a wraith among princes and princesses fed on cream and honey. Her hair hung loose and white, her eyes clouded as though blind. And blind she was, by every healer’s account.

Every shaman, every priest, every seer fell to their knees in front of her, for Izanami no Mikoto claimed her body. Ōmononushi claimed her sight. Amaterasu Ōmikami claimed her heart. And so Kamiko belongs to all three, and to none.

The gods of Death, Justice, and Life had laid their blessings upon her, and in doing so had severed her from mankind. The gifts made her untouchable, unknowable: resilient as stone, yet brittle as glass; blind to the world, yet keen to the marrow of men; never an object of envy or despise, yet feared as an omen. She was both curse and miracle, and neither could be denied.